To celebrate, politicos and journalists around the country have written op-eds and articles in your honor:
Washington Post:
To the court's majority, it was "stranger than fiction for our Government to make . . . political speech a crime."Stranger still were the unwarranted attacks against the Supreme Court that followed. Most visibly, the president used his State of the Union address to accuse the court of having "reversed a century of law" and "open[ed] the floodgates for special interests - including foreign corporations - to spend without limit in our elections." That statement was astonishing because none of it was true: The oldest decision reversed by Citizens United was 20 years old, not 100, and foreign corporations are prohibited from participating in elections, just as they were before. As for "special interests," many had been spending at an equally furious rate, apparently unnoticed by the president, well before this ruling.NPR:
"We're here today on what should be a happy day for those of us who sought clarity in the law, less regulation," Republican Commissioner Don McGahn said.He and the other two Republicans wanted new rules that didn't mandate disclosure of big, undisclosed contributions — the kind that financed thousands of attack ads last year. The three Democrats wanted the mandatory disclosure. So the commission deadlocked."Promoting transparency in American elections is central to the commission's mission, and this transparency in turn is essential to the success of this, the world's oldest democracy," said Democratic Commissioner Ellen Weintraub. "We don't believe in doing things in secret."
Sometimes covering election law issues is like watching paint dry. It is, I think, a challenge to make these issues interesting and accessible for a general reader. In this election there was just so much money and so much secrecy, so the stories were probably of broader interest. I cannot recall a case since Bush v. Gore in 2000 when the public has shown such interest in a Supreme Court case. That helps to make the case for covering the impact ofCitizens United.Rick Hasen II:
Whether Justice Kennedy believed that existing campaign finance disclosure law would provide for this free and instantaneous exchange of information about campaign money or whether he was instead advocating that Congress adopt such a system is unclear. What is clear, however, is that Citizens United has not only unleashed new money into the election process; actions by lower courts and the FEC, combined with an inadequate disclosure regime, have led to a system of largely undisclosed corporate, union, and individual campaign contributions flooding into elections.Columbus Dispatch:
On today's one-year anniversary of the controversial U.S. Supreme Court ruling giving corporations and labor unions greater rein to spend money on behalf of campaigns, state Rep. Jay Goyal, D-Mansfield, plans to introduce legislation to ban businesses that get state contracts from making campaign contributions with corporate cash.In addition, groups are planning a protest rally in Columbus to argue for a federal constitutional amendment in response to the ruling.
The government's other argument was that our political campaigns have become too expensive, too strident, too vacuous, too uninformative, and need to be reined in. Here the court's answer was even more insistent about who has the first and last word on how much political speech Americans get to have: "In the free society ordained by our Constitution, it is not the government but the people—individually as citizens and candidates and collectively as associations and political committees—who must retain control over the quantity and range of debate on public issues in a political campaign."
As the court has recognized across the decades, despite the byzantine complexity of our restrictive and burdensome campaign-finance laws, the clash between them and the First Amendment presents a rather simple and stark choice. Either the politicians and the government get to decide how much political speech there will be and what form it will take, or the people and the groups they organize get to make that call.
And, a lovely video, produced by Citizens United itself, featuring Ted Olson, Brad Smith and others.
I'll post more links as I find them.
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